How Does The Differences Between Sensation And Perception Work?

The visual system is one of our most important and complex sensory systems, it allows us to interact and respond to our environment in many essential ways. The visual system includes the eye which senses energy from the environment and collects or modifies the incoming energy, receptors that transform raw energy into neural impulses and a series of neurons involved in transmitting signals to the brain in order to be processed to create perception. In order to understand how vision works we need to examine how sensation and perception work to provide our experiences of the world around us.

This essay discusses the structure of the eye and the brain which perform the processes involved in vision, the links and distinctions between sensation

The eye is sensitive to light with many structures working together to interpret light and transduce it in order for it to be detected and analysed by the brain.

The cornea, a transparent bulge at the front of the eye, and the lens, situated behind the iris, cause images to be focused on the retina. The ciliary muscles contract to alter the shape of the lens in order to focus images that are far away or nearby on the retina in a process called accommodation. The retina, performs the sensory functions of the eye, containing the receptor cells- rods and cones which are collectively called photoreceptors (Carlson,

It contains many structures and components which work together to focus light energy on the retina in order to be picked up by the photoreceptors which convert light waves into neural impulses transmitted by the optic nerve to the primary visual cortex of the brain. Sensation, the absorption of raw energy from stimuli and perception, the process of organising and making sense of this information are distinct yet complementary processes which work together to provide our experience of the world with one not being fully functional without the other as demonstrated by prosopagnosia. The cognitive approach to perception best explains how we perceive our environment through both the stimulation of sensory receptors and how our expectation and knowledge influence our perceptions creating a perception which is not always an exact copy of the world. This is further explained by the Gestalt laws of perceptual organisation which describe how we organise stimulus parts into wholes by creating the simplest structure or image. Overall our eyes and brain conquer amazing feats in affording us the array of perceptual abilities that we can perform. Research on the structures and processes involved in vision has been comprehensive however, future research should look at examining the function of organising our environment in the way that we